Motivation and Merciless Commitment Contracts

Generally, people make decisions on the margin, and so there should be some contract where making that contract will change you from not doing something to doing something. It does seem to have very different usefulness for different people, though.

It could very well be that there are people for whom 2 is easier than 3. When it comes to social confidence different people have different issues.

The exercises had that order in the source from which I took them. For myself 3 was much harder than 2.

The reaction I got on day 1 didn't differ much than the reaction I got on day 2. Most of the time people don't care that much about yourself. If you ask them for the time they either don't want to spend any time, don't have a clock or they do the easy thing of just giving you the time.

Yes; now that I remember about that, I once responded to a bouncer calling me out (though the thing I had done was different than sitting on the floor) that way. (But bouncers are less friendly in certain places than in others, IME.)

Depending on peirce's psychology, doing something in a club and being thrown out might be analogue to cautiously stepping out of your house after staying there for months for fear of spiders and ending up covered in tarantulas.

Part of what such exercises are about is demostrating yourself that you have agency.

If you lose control over the situation in a way that you didn't expect beforehand and people disapprove of you in that way it doesn't encourage yourself to see your own agency.

I've fixed the formatting. You can do this by copy-pasting the text into the article editor from a plain text editor (that doesn't support formatting) and then adding the necessary formatting (such as headings and italics) in the article editor. Alternatively, you can edit the HTML source by clicking "Edit HTML Source" button in the article editor, and remove all nonstandard formatting tags from there.

It may or may not be possible to train such that text to speech can be understood faster than reading visually (I've only heard extremely vague anecdotes on this, but it'd be interesting to test).

I don't think this is likely. Standard human speech is about 150 wpm, and while people can get up to listening to at 2-3 times that, it takes significant practice. I get the impression that many more people can read at 300 wpm than can listen at 300 wpm, and so on up the scale.

Listening is also very unforgiving to attention lapses or sections that deserve careful thought, whereas when reading normally it is easy to pause or 'rewind.'

For future reference, how does LW article formatting work, and what is standard?

My experience has been that composing articles on the "create new article" page leads to standard formatting, and that if you copy text in from another source you need to be careful to scrub it of formatting first. (One way that may work for that is to paste it into the html source, but that can lead to other problems. Copying it into a text file editor like notepad seems like a better approach.)

I'm not sure whether the kind of confidence that involved in asking "have you seen my pet fish?" is the kind that's generally a good thing.

It's not the kind of action where it's very valuable to be able to perform it.

It might make sense to train on something that doesn't have negative externalities to other people.

Elsewhere he sounds like he tried some other kind of negative incentives and it didn't work.

Unless you have literally zero interest in finding out, there should be some sum of money, possibly less than $5, equal to the value of learning what you will actually do when you set up a contract for yourself.

That's tricky. The experience of setting up a commitment contract for 0.0001% of your wealth is unlikely to provide any learning as to what you will actually do in response to a commitment contract of 5% (or 50%) of your wealth.

What sort of professional do you see if you want to do some minor self-help thing like improve social skills?

Heh, well, it may be that people in the poorer stratum of society have a lower chance to possess herculean self-control in the first place; good motivation and self-control, after all, do propel people from poverty in places with some social mobility.

First off, the subgroup we're considering -- that fraction of poor people who want to increase their motivation and self-control -- may not really be common or representative. It certainly seems to be predominantly a struggle of people from the middle and upper classes. I'm not really sure very poor people have the conditions for wanting to be more productive but failing to modify their behavior accordingly. That requires some sort of infrastructure to ensure your comfort while you fail at your goal of becoming motivated. Perhaps other people (e.g. parents) affording to support you, or a cushy job that sometimes pays you to play Solitaire and check Facebook... If you're really poor and seek motivation, you generally only need to look around you, notice your shitty living conditions. Or you could just not seek motivation and remain complacent (which happens, a lot). But it's hardly possible to seek it and be unable to find it. It's only a little higher up the income scale, at the lower middle level, that it becomes easier to procrastinate comfortably.

Procrastination is still mostly an individual problem, and the solutions need to be tailored to a particular individual's reasons for procrastinating; it's just that, as with all things, fancier solutions become available as income raises. When all you own is your body and perhaps some tools or a plot of land, the path to productivity is a strong work ethic. (That is how virtually all my family views this issue, and my mom's basically the living example of work ethic. The only person in my family that has heard of Pomodoros and thinks about productivity like us at LW lives in a big, fancy house in a nice residential area in the heart of the city.)

(The following is not necessarily related to motivation, but is relevant to the previous discussion about money.) It may also be worth noting that restraint in spending money is usually vital to climbing into the middle class (you'll never get to save enough for a nice place to live if you blow all your money on stupid shit the first time it falls into your hands), and that there are class-specific ways of conceptualizing money in the first place. (I remember RibbonFarm having a nice article about this.) When you're not rich, money is strictly something you get for working. It's never ever something you have to spend to work more. An investment had better be damn obvious to be registered as such. That's why I said it was a very upper-middle-class thing to do, to risk money to get motivated.

It's also very common for people at the lower-middle income lever and lower to attend their financial needs before lofty stuff like self-improvement for its own sake. A worthy endeavour is one that gets you more money at the same time, or improves your earning capacity. (Example: after high school I wanted to take a gap year to dedicate it to learning what I want, at a self-imposed pace, but that decision got vetoed by my parents; they thought it was high time for me to prepare for entering the workforce, and worried about no longer being able to support me.)

Hopefully this answer is satisfactory; I wish I could say akrasia is a solved problem for me, but it isn't, so my answer was more on the descriptive side, rather than the normative. I can't speak as an authority on this, just as an observation point placed in the middle of a certain kind of crowd.

Sorry I don't quite understand what you mean by "check your privilege" and how that constitutes a counter argument to the idea that commitment contracts should work all the more so if you are poorer. Could you explain?

It's a bit tongue-in-cheek, since "check your privilege" gets used a lot in some places by some folks that I really don't like and avoid to associate with. It means that some aspects of other people's normal existence just fly over your head because of some assumptions in your worldview that exist because you've been living a very sheltered life. It's a bit like -- well, I don't want to say this either, because worst argument in the world and all that -- rebellious teenagers thinking "Man, it would be pretty awesome to live on the streets and dumpster dive for a while, as a big "fuck you" to the establishment. It can't be that bad -- I'll make do."

In this context, said privilege in need of checking is the belief that poor people can and should spend their money like rich people do, if on a smaller scale, and that the fear of losing their money has a similar mostly positive impact on their mindsets as it does on rich people. It's the privilege of precommitting to give away a large sum, and then fail, and then give it away, and then return to your normal life with a sense of loss, but no seriously ugly repercussions. And then preach it to other people, "regardless of their income".

I agree that in some situations where you have very little money financial commitment contracts may not be the best idea. What do you think about commitment contracts that are based on social incentives rather than financial ones? or any other kind of commitment contract that isn't based around money? eg. http://aherk.com/

Yeah, I thought about asking something like that in my original post, but forgot about it. For those who want to attempt something like this but aren't quite swimming in cash, it would be a good idea to have some form of non-monetary incentive.

I'm not entirely sure what you're saying. Is it that poor people can use the same contract structure by just reducing the money they pledge according to how the utility is weighted?

So, if, say, someone making $3000/month (say expenses leave them with $1000 after all is said and done) is trying commitment contracts, it'd be reasonable for them to pledge $1000, or maybe $500 if their savings are in dire straights, but someone making $1000 a month (who is probably in debt at the end of the month) should still find a monetary value greater than $0.00 that they can justify pledging? What if someone has net negative income, where the value of overcoming akrasia might be the difference between bankrupsy and financial stability, but the money they have available to pledge would come out of there "please don't take everything I own that could possibly get me back into the economy" fund, where failure would be the difference between inescapable poverty and the (still crappy but slightly less so) status quo? I'm assuming pledging negative money on failure is obviously not allowed.

Notice that this distinction is entirely social and psychological and has nothing to do with the actual micro-economic incentives that apply at various levels of class status or wealth. You describe how poorer people get more value per marginal dollar added. While this means that a commitment device that uses money costs more in practical value. However, the same consideration applies to the motivational impact of any given monetary incentive.

Diminishing marginal utility applies to both sides.

It's more complicated than that. As explained in Thinking: Fast and Slow, most people are risk adverse in gains, risk prone in losses, and weigh losses more heavily for gains, but whereas for well-off people gains and losses are measured from the status quo, for the very poor they're counted from a higher level, so that up to a certain point getting more money feels more like a reduced loss than a gain (which is why poor people are more likely to spend sizeable chunks of money on lotteries).

So, it's well possible that the risk of losing 1% of one's money has a different motivational effect for someone very poor than for someone well off.

Notice that this distinction is entirely social and psychological and has nothing to do with the actual micro-economic incentives that apply at various levels of class status or wealth.

Yeah, I know. That's what I was going for.

I suggest checking how your perception of lack of privilege is holding you back. Some limitations are real. Others, like this one, are merely perceived.

Holding me back from what? From pursuing a strategy of combating akrasia that runs contrary to my goal of making and keeping money?

I've had no success with negative incentives before

You should mention that in the other comment -- ‘I've tried something similar before and it didn't work’ is more reasonable-sounding than ‘nah, that wouldn't work’.

Are you claiming that you have no akrasia and that getting rid of it isn't valuable?

Well. Am I claiming that I have no akrasia and that getting rid of it (of something I don't presumably have) isn't valuable? Did I say anything about the worthlessness of getting rid of akrasia? Not as far as I remember, in fact I think it's a valuable pursuit. Did I confess to not having any problems at all with akrasia? Why, I think I actually mentioned the contrary somewhere in there. So no, I'm not claiming that! (Not many people are likely to hold that position, so don't ask that question.)

Now for your actual concern -- well, yes, getting rid of akrasia is valuable, but it's not necessarily economically valuable, in that not all related self-modifications increase your future potential to earn, or provide you with some good of an economic nature. Just like making friends or increasing the accuracy of your model of the world, it has a messy relationship with economic value, although nobody could just flat-out claim that it's not valuable in any sense.

I shall point you to Maslow's hierarchy of needs here -- defeating akrasia falls into the highest category of the pyramid, "self-actualization", and poorer folks just have a lot of stuff screaming at them from the lower levels of the pyramid. The choice is between maybe failing and losing money and feeling like shit, or buying some stuff that's been on your wishlist for a long time or paying off a debt or Omega knows what else.

If you are poor you can just lower the amount of money that you put into the commitment contract to have the same psychological value has the same amount of money has to upper-middle class people.

Obviously it crossed my mind. But my point was that before you answer the question of how much to pledge, you first have to give a certain answer to the question of whether to pledge anything at all. To the latter question, people on LW seem to give a hearty, unambiguous "YES". That's what I'm taking issue with. From my (short) experience, it's like if you even say out loud that no, you don't think that it's a good idea for yourself and you aren't going to try it, people are going to try to pressure you into trying it anyway. Or downvote. Saying "No thanks, I like my money" basically begets the answer "Well then you must like your akrasia too!". It's at this point that issues of social class and status rear their ugly head, and you begin suspecting that this isn't about giving each other good advice in everybody's best interest, but rich folks wanting to be among other rich folks and using costly means of combating akrasia to indirectly gauge your socioeconomic class.